rt Nouveau through documentary material

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Art Nouveau through
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documentary material
Rosalba
Cilione,
Simona
Pandolfi
Italy
Carlo Bugatti,
chairs
with flowers painted
by Giovanni Segatini,
1887-88 ca.,
photograph held
in the Archives
of 20th Century
Italian Applied Arts
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Cover
of the magazine
“Novissima”,
1902,
illustrated by
Antonio Rizzi
The Archives were founded to valorise
Italian decorative arts and hold documents
of various types, including photographs,
letters, magazines, and publications
dedicated to artists and manufacturers
active during the first half of the
20th century.
The Archives of 20th Century Italian Applied Arts are a documentation and research
centre with a specialized library founded in
1987 by Irene de Guttry, Maria Paola Maino,
and Mario Quesada (in 2002, Gabriella Tarquini succeeded Mario Quesada, who died in
1996). The Archives were founded to valorise
Italian decorative arts and hold documents of
various types, including photographs, letters,
magazines, and publications dedicated to artists and manufacturers active during the first
half of the 20th century. The focus is on works
of applied art (furniture, ceramics, glassworks,
wrought iron, tapestries, posters, book illustrations, etc.) with a particular emphasis on
certain Roman artists, such as Duilio Cambelzupapomidorowa
lotti. In addition, the archives hold documentary material on artists including Ulisse Arata,
Domenico Baccarini, Giacomo Balla, Alfredo
Baruffi, Ernesto Basile, Alfredo Biagini, Umberto Bottazzi, Giovanni Buffa, Carlo Bugatti,
Felice Casorati, Ezio Castellucci, Galileo Chini, Camillo Innocenti, Giorgio Kienerk, Alberto Martini, Aleardo Terzi, Edoardo Rubino,
Ettore Ximenes, Vittorio Zecchin, and Carlo
Zen.
One of the newest publications of the Archives of 20th Century Italian Applied Arts is Antiquariato del '900, edited by Irene de Guttry and
Maria Paola Maino with the collaboration of
Gabriella Tarquini, published by Il Sole 24 Ore
oreszabadabadaamore
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Alessandro Mazzucotelli,
cases for cigarettes,
plate published in
Modelli d'arte decorativa,
1907
in 2013. This is a thirty-volume series on the
applied arts that aims to provide a framework
for learning about the main authors and artistic
movements from Art Nouveau to the postWWII era, and testifies to its authors’ interest
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and commitment to disseminating knowledge
on the applied arts to the public at large. The
Archives participate in the Partage Plus - Art
Nouveau project by contributing magazines,
books, paper documents and photographs.
Annex
to the letter sent by
Gabriele D'Annunzio to
Adolfo De Carolis,
5/04/1902,
with indications for
completing the drawing
for the weather
vane of the dog pound
The magazine Novissima, one of the most elegant expressions of Italian Art Nouveau, was
founded in 1901 by Edoardo de Fonseca, an
intellectual who shared the modernist ideas of
the artists who collaborated with the magazine,
including Aleardo Terzi, Antonio Rizzi, Riccardo Galli, Giorgio Kienerk, Alberto Micheli,
Luigi Brunelli, Duilio Cambellotti, Marcello
Dudovich, Luigi Bompard, and Alfredo Baruffi. With its innovative graphic design, Novissima published literary and journalistic essays,
numerous plates of graphic art, columns, and
an advertising section at the end, with ads ranging from Fernet-Branca to the ceramics
maker Richard Ginori. After two years in Milan, the magazine was transferred to Rome in
1903, and the last issue was published in 1910.
Il Giovane Artista Moderno was a magazine founded in Turin in 1902, the year in which the
influence of Art Nouveau in Italy was at its
zenith. The first year’s issues are dedicated for
the most part to the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin, on
which occasion the leading examples of Art
Nouveau architecture, furniture, and applied
arts in Europe were exhibited.
³ñ
The documents described during the initial
phase of the project are contained in the
following magazines: “Novissima”, “Il Giovane
Artista Moderno”, “Art et Décoration: revue mensuelle d'art moderne”, “L'Art Décoratif: revue de l'art
ancien & de la vie artistique moderne”, “L'Art Décoratif: revue mensuelle d'art contemporain”, “Revue
des Arts Décoratifs”, “The Artist: an illustrated
monthly record of arts crafts and industries”, “The
Studio: an illustrated magazine of fine and applied
art”, and in the series of volumes that come
with “Il Sole 24 Ore”: Antiquariato del '900,
edited by Irene de Guttry and Maria Paola
Maino (Milan, Il Sole 24 Ore, 2013).
The Archives of 20th Century Italian Applied
Arts, while concentrating on studying the applied arts in Italy, also hold numerous issues of
foreign magazines, such as “Art et Décoration:
revue mensuelle d'art moderne”, “L’Art Décoratif:
revue mensuelle d’art contemporain” and “The Studio:
an illustrated magazine of fine and applied art”.
These magazines are important for documenting the modern style in an international
setting. In England, a key role in disseminating
Art Nouveau was played by the magazine The
Studio, founded in London in 1893, which
organized applied art competitions. The Parisbased magazines Art et Décoration and L’Art
Décoratif, the former founded in 1897 and the
latterarts.
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Letter
with watercolour sent
by Giulio Aristide
Sartorio
to Pietro Giorgi,
April 1884
latter in 1898, were vital for the development
of Art Nouveau in France, especially with
regard to the applied arts.
During the second phase of the project, other
Italian magazines that played an important role
in disseminating Art Nouveau in Italy were
digitized. One of these is Emporium, an illustrated magazine founded in 1895 and inspired
by The Studio and other international magazines. For this reason, it played a significant
role in popularizing the main European artistic
currents of the time, such as the Pre-Raphaelites and the Jugendstil movement, helping
shape artistic tastes in Italy.
Some of the documents related to the project’s
first phase are drawn from a second resource
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centre: the National Central Library of Rome, one of the two Italian state libraries whose
main purpose is to collect and archive all national publications. With about 7,000,000
printed books, 2,000 incunables, 25,000 postincunables, 8,000 manuscripts, 10,000 prints
and drawings, 20,000 maps, and 1,342,154 brochures it is the largest library in Italy. The
building that currently houses it was built between 1965 and 1975 by a group of architects Massimo Castellazzi, Tullio Dell'Anese, and
Annibale Vitellozzi - who adhered to the
International Style current.
The National Central Library of Rome participates in the Partage Plus - Art Nouveau
project with magazines such as Per l’arte: rivista
bimestrale d’arte decorativa (seven volumes, from
Collection
Postcard sent by
Giovanni Buffa
to Ugo Ojetti,
Milan,
12/06/1908.
The document is
illustrated with an
image of a plate
glass window by
G. Beltrami & C.,
where Buffa
himself worked
1909 to 1915) and Modelli d’arte decorativa (eight
volumes from 1907 to 1915). These magazines
contain illustrations of works and models of
art by various artists including Adolfo De Carolis and Duilio Cambellotti. The cataloguing
of these two magazines was completed during
the second phase of the project. Additionally,
documents held in four historical collections
of the National Gallery of Modern Art were
catalogued and digitized: the Adolfo De Carolis Collection, the Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Collection, the Ugo Ojetti Collection, and the
Umberto Prencipe Collection.
Adolfo De Carolis Collection
Adolfo De Carolis (De Karolis) was born in
1874. He studied at the Bologna Academy of
Fine Arts and attended the School of Decorative Painting in Rome. In 1896, he joined
the In Arte Libertas association and began to
makeunityssionate
make paintings inspired by the PreRaphaelites. Starting in 1900 he was full professor of ornament at the Florence Academy
of Fine Arts. His friendship and collaboration
with Gabriele D’Annunzio, as evidenced by
their frequent correspondence, led to the staging of some of his theatre pieces. Around
1905 De Carolis began to show interest in the
unity of the arts, and in decorative and applied
art. In 1915 he was given the chair of decorative arts at the Brera Academy and subsequently at the Rome Academy, where he
taught scenography and decoration. In 1924 he
published a treatise on xylography, an art that
had been forgotten for centuries, and which he
helped bring back to the fore thanks his passionate research and studies on ancient art. He
died in 1928.
The De Carolis collection, purchased in 1986,
augmented the National Gallery of Modern
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Greeting card
sent by Vittorio Ducrot
to Ugo Ojetti,
Palermo, 30/12/1904
Art’s extensive holdings of material about De
Carolis. The archives, which were kept by De
Carolis’s daughter Adriana, together with her
husband Diego Pettinelli, who was a pupil of
his father-in-law, maintain their original alphabetical arrangement by correspondent. In
1997 the archive was augmented by a collection
of 128 photographs and 8 small drawings. The
De Carolis Collection includes various photographs, some taken by the artist himself, which
testify to his interest for Renaissance art and
photography in general, which often served as
inspiration for his own works.
Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Collection
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Giulio Aristide Sartorio was born in 1860. He
learned the art of drawing from his father
Raffaele and his grandfather Girolamo, both
of whom were sculptors. He sporadically
attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome,
where he honed his skills especially by working
on studies, copies, and imitations of the frescoes, mosaics, paintings, and statues of Rome’s
basilicas and museums. He made his debut
under the wing of Mariano Fortuny and later,
under the influence of Francesco Paolo Michetti, he turned to a humanitarian-accented
realism. In 1884 he travelled to Paris. During
these years he published some illustrations in
Angelo Sommaruga’s Cronaca bizantina, Adolfo
de Bosis’s Convito, and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
Isotta Guttadauro, which marked a gradual shift
towards a decorative style influenced by Art
Nouveau. Having developed an interest in the
research of Nino Costa, his first landscapes
date to 1890, when he joined the In Arte
Libertas association, which called for an aristocratic renewal of art through the reappraisal
of the great Florentine artists of the 15th century, following the example of the Pre-Raphaelites. After a trip to England in 1893 in order
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to gain first-hand experience with Pre-Raphaelite art, he worked as a professor at the
Weimar Academy from 1895 to 1899. During
this sojourn, he completed his diptych Diana of
Ephesus and the slaves and Gorgon and the heroes,
which is held at the National Gallery of
Modern Art in Rome. This monumental work
of decorative art fairly bursts with dramatic
emphasis and Pre-Raphaelite references.
The Giulio Aristide Sartorio Collection consists of an exchange of correspondence
between the painter himself and his friend
Pietro Giorgi (1850-1916), an artist and often
patron of the arts not only for Sartorio but also
for Ricci, Morani, Coleman, and Carlandi. The
collection, purchased by the National Gallery
of Modern Art in November 2000 on the
suggestion of the Giorgi heirs, is particularly
interesting both because it illustrates the young
Sartorio’s discovery of Paris, where he worked
and studied thanks to Giorgi’s financial support, and because it documents his first attempts at art. Indeed, the margins of 18 letters
show graphic notes, watercolours, ink sketches, and small drawings.
Letter sent
by Tomaso Bencivenga
to Umberto Prencipe,
Rome, 15/11/1919.
Bencivenga
expressed his wish
to renew
the Roman secession
with a “new”
and “vital” spirit”
cians, professionals, and entertainers. The documentary material contained in the collection
comprises letters, postcards, telegrams, copies
of typed letters, calling cards, notes, reports,
printed documents, and photographs. Additionally, there is a series of antique letters by
various artists addressed to Domenico Trentacoste and a Collection of autographs. As part of
the Partage Plus - Art Nouveau project, some
documentation concerns artists from that
period, including Giovanni Buffa, Vittorio
Ducrot, Arturo Noci, Plinio Nomellini, etc.
Umberto Prencipe Collection
Umberto Prencipe was born in 1879. He was
a landscape painter and participated in the
Roman secessions of 1913 and 1914. The
archive was deposited at the National Gallery
of Modern Art in July 2007. The documentation includes a section comprising correspondence with artists, critics, and institutions;
another on his professional and artistic activities; and a third section containing notes,
certificates, personal documents, and a postcard collection.
The Partage Plus project includes his
correspondence with Pietro D’Achiardi and
Tomaso Bencivenga, which is of particular
interest to the project.
Ugo Ojetti Collection
Results of the work
Ugo Ojetti (1871 – 1946) was a journalist and
art critic. The collection, purchased by the
National Gallery of Modern Art on 15 December 1973, consists of two series of correspondence, arranged alphabetically. The first
consists of 78 folders with correspondence
from 1,987 artists, collectors, and art writers;
the second consists of 113 folders containing
correspondence from 4,315 scholars, politiNomellini, etc.
During the Partage Plus project, a total of
6,644 cards were compiled using the Museo&Web system: 1,953 magazine cards (articles, advertisements, cover pages, frontispieces), 1,488 iconographic cards (plates, illustrations, advertisements, photographs), 3,203 archival document cards (letters, postcards, telegrams, etc.).
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